More than crippled, we are! We are becoming sons and daughters of God, and brothers, sisters and friends of Jesus! This changes everything. We choose to stand up, and then He teaches us how to walk!
The story of the crippled man by the pool of Bethesda, contains a pattern of not just initial healing, but what is required to walk it out. At the start of the story, Jesus evokes him, by asking him if he really wants to be whole. Not just physically healed, but to see himself in an entirely new way, a new light. To re-align His feeling about himself with Jesus’ feelings about him.
To re-align ourselves with how the Kingdom sees us, who we really are in His Kingdom is Christ-centered spirituality. Are we willing not just to stand up, but to learn to walk out our new life, no longer seeing ourselves as wounded victims of our situation, but seeing and feeling about ourselves as God does.
This is to address the spring of feelings and our interpretation of our lives. This is more than initial salvation, this is walking in His process of depth sanctification. This little story presents a pattern of how Jesus heals us, or makes us whole. It starts with a question, and our saying yes. Then what is required of us, is an entire recalibration of being. We no longer see ourselves as rippled, wounded losers by the pool, ones who cannot reproduce, ones who are stranded without social impact.
And what happens when the man stands up, is he must now find an entirely different network of support as well. His social life changes. How others have treated him is no longer appropriate. He has been changed by a Jesus encounter, and must make a new life.
Jesus tells His disciples, leave what you are doing, and follow me. That is the starting point. Then they learn to walk with Him. There entire life path and mission changed. They had new people to hang out with and grow with, they went to physically new places. Many were fishermen, and probably did not travel so much. Now they would travel all over, and even go out to other nations. Their journeys changed. They ended up in spaces they would not have, had they not met The Man Jesus.
The man by the pool or the woman by the well, both afterwards, had to make up a new life. They were no longer seekers, but those who had found the source of all Healing. Now, their lives were radically altered. They could no longer sit in the same places they did before, or be perceived by others in the same way. They had changed. Now, their whole lives aim would be to be like the One who had changed them.
Our feelings and thoughts start to center around His, and are altered by this communion with His thoughts and feelings, and imaging of us. We feel and think differently about ourselves and others. We start to perceive ourselves as something other than just crippled! More than crippled, us!
We see things more from a Kingdom perspective, because we have encountered, been saved, and are now being radically transformed by walking with and in Him. We enter the trajectory of being made whole in Jesus! Our union with Him, not just heals us, it transforms us, as we walk along with Him. We no longer lean into our own understanding and interpretation, even of ourselves; rather in every situation we lean into His interpretation and understanding, and we learn to trust that He will then direct our ways, and guide our thoughts and interpretations, and hence our feelings which follow from our interpretations.
And even when we cannot see or interpret fully, we trust that He can, and will reveal to us, what we need to know.
These characters in scripture, offer hope for true lasting transformation. Of moving from salvation into a life of sanctification in Christ. Where His Life is more fully formed in us. Our entire vision of who we are, and what life is is altered by our proximity to Him. We start to become who we truly are, as we walk next to Jesus. We come to interpret ourselves and others around us much more accurately, and we come to act accordingly.
